People
Faculty Fellows
Helen Nissenbaum
Coordinator
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum’s research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, and facial recognition technology. Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Barton Beebe joined NYU School of Law in the Fall 2009 from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Barton Beebe received the Class of 2007 Award for Best Professor. Prior to joining Cardozo’s faculty, he clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. Professor Beebe received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and an articles editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, his Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he was a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, and his B.A. from the University of Chicago (Phi Beta Kappa). In 2007, Professor Beebe served as a Special Master, with Professor Daniel J. Capra, in Louis Vuitton Malletier v. Dooney & Bourke, Inc., No. 04 Civ. 2990 (SAS) (S.D.N.Y.). Professor Beebe’s teaching and scholarship focuses on intellectual property law.
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler ’01 teaches Contracts, Commercial Law, and Topics in E-Commerce. Her expertise is on online contracting in general and software licensing in particular. Her published research has addressed online standard form contracting with delayed disclosure; contracting in the presence of seller market power; and, online dispute resolution clauses including arbitration. Her current research documents the extremely low readership rate of standard form contracts by consumers and discusses implications for regulation of standard terms. Professor Marotta-Wurgler earned a B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D., cum laude, from the NYU School of Law, where she was a Robert McKay Scholar and winner of the Daniel G. Collins Prize for Excellence in Contract Law. Before joining the faculty she was an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a Corporate Fellow at the Center for Corporate, Securities, and Financial Law at Fordham University School of Law, and a Leonard Wagner Fellow in Law and Business at the Pollack Center for Law and Business at NYU Law and Stern School of Business.
Erin Murphy joined the NYU faculty in 2010 from UC Berkeley School of Law. Her research explores issues related to technology, state power, and the criminal justice system, with a particular emphasis on street crime. Murphy has written extensively in the area of forensic DNA typing, most recently in Relative Doubt: Familial Searches of DNA Evidence (Michigan Law Review, forthcoming), and has co-authored work at the intersection of law and science with Dr. Montgomery Slatkin and Dr. Yun Song. Murphy's article Paradigms of Restraint (Duke Law Journal) won the AALS Criminal Justice Section 2008 award for best paper by a junior scholar, and her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. Murphy teaches courses related to criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence. She is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where she served as notes editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a former clerk to the Honorable Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Murphy practiced for five years as an attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented clients in felony and misdemeanor cases in jury and bench trials, argued before the D.C. Court of Appeals, and led a widely watched constitutional challenge to the District of Columbia’s firearms law.
Samuel J. Rascoff joined the NYU School of Law faculty in June 2008. He came to the Law School from the New York City Police Department, where, as Director of Intelligence Analysis, he created and led a team responsible for assessing the terrorist threat to the city. A graduate of Harvard (summa cum laude), Oxford (First Class Honors), and Yale Law School, he previously served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was also a special assistant with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. As an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, his practice focused on the settlement of complex litigation. Rascoff teaches and writes in the areas of national security law, counterterrorism, and regulatory law and policy. His recent publications include Domesticating Intelligence (So. Cal. L. Rev.) and The Law of Homegrown (Counter) Terrorism (Tex. L. Rev.). Named a Carnegie Scholar in 2009, Rascoff’s current research focuses on understanding “Official Islam.”
Ira Rubinstein
In residence Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013
Ira Rubinstein is a Senior Fellow at the Information Law Institute. His research interests include Internet privacy, electronic surveillance law, online identity, and Internet security. Rubinstein lectures and publishes widely on issues of privacy and security and has testified before Congress on these topics on several occasions. In September 2009, he organized a conference at the law school on Federal Privacy Legislation, and he participated in the December 2009 Federal Trade Commission Roundtable: Exploring Privacy. In July 2010, he testified at a hearing on a new privacy bill, H.R. 5777, the Best Practices Act, before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. In 2011, he was awarded a research grant to explore regulatory issues related to “privacy by design.” He discussed his paper Regulating Privacy by Design at a 2011 Boalt Hall Law School symposium on Technology: Transforming the Regulatory Endeavor, and his paper will be published in the Symposium Issue of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2012). Most recently, he co-authored, with Professor Dennis Hirsch, a paper entitled Better Safe than Sorry: Designing Effective Safe Harbor Programs for Consumer Privacy Legislation. Other recent publications include Privacy and Regulatory Innovation: Moving Beyond Voluntary Codes, 6 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 356 (2011), which was selected by the Future of Privacy Forum in their best “Privacy Papers for Policy Makers” competition, and Data Mining and Internet Profiling: Emerging Regulatory and Technological Approaches, co-authored with Ron Lee and Paul Schwartz, 75 U. Chi. L. Rev. 261 (2008). Prior to joining the ILI, Rubinstein spent 17 years in Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs department, most recently as Associate General Counsel in charge of the Regulatory Affairs and Public Policy group. Before coming to Microsoft, he was in private practice in Seattle, specializing in immigration law. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1985. From 1998-2001, Rubinstein served on the President's Export Council, Subcommittee on Encryption. He has also served on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine. In 2010, he joined the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He was a Board member of the Seattle Public Library Foundation from 2006-2011 and previously served on the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and as a Trustee of the American Immigration Lawyers Foundation.
Katherine Strandburg joined NYU School of Law in the Fall 2009 from DePaul University College of Law. A distinguished intellectual property scholar, Kathy’s research interests are in patent law, science and technology policy, law and network science, social norm theory, and information privacy law. Trained as a physicist, Kathy’s scholarship is informed by her experience as a research scientist and her interdisciplinary perspective. Before embarking on a legal career, Kathy received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon from 1984 to 1987. She also conducted research with the Condensed Matter Theory Group at Argonne National Laboratory from 1987 to 1992, and was a visiting faculty member of the physics department at Northwestern University from 1990 to 1992. Kathy earned her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1995 and clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Diane Zimmerman
Diane Leenheer Zimmerman is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law Emerita at NYU School of Law. An award-winning reporter for Newsweek and the New York Daily News, Diane Zimmerman left journalism to pursue a career in the law. In 1977, after graduating from Columbia Law School and clerking for Judge Jack B. Weinstein in the Eastern District of New York, she joined the faculty at New York University School of Law. Issues of civil liberties—particularly women’s rights, and freedom of speech and conscience—propelled Zimmerman from journalism into law, and she has taught, lectured, and written extensively on all of these subjects. Her other major area of academic specialization is intellectual property. Outside activities include chairing the First Amendment Rights Committee of the American Bar Association for five years. She has also chaired the Civil Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and served on its Copyright, Professional Ethics, Communications and Media Law Committees. In the field of intellectual property, Zimmerman serves on the executive committee of the Copyright Society’s board of trustees. She is a member of the editorial board of the Society’s Journal as well as that of the Communication Law and Policy Journal. Professor Zimmerman has been an expert witness for the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate, and a member of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Working Group on Women, Censorship and Pornography. The Second Circuit appointed Zimmerman Reporter for the Gender Committee of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness.
Research Fellows
Martin French
Martin French is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He studies the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications and information technology in the public-health and medical-care sectors. At a pragmatic, everyday level, his research program involves forging partnerships that span government, academic, and community-based organizations, and using these partnerships to mobilize innovative best-practices through the creation of evidence-informed policy. From 2010-2012, Martin held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada, and in 2011 he was appointed visiting fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Australia. His dissertation, entitled Picturing Public Health Surveillance, examines transformations in Ontario’s public health information ecology following the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Sophie Hood
Sophie Hood is a research fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Information Law Institute at New York University. Her work concentrates on the intersection of new media technologies and adjudication. Specifically, she studies the impact of judicial videoconferencing, cameras in the courtroom, and online court records on adjudicative process and democratic society. Hood has previously studied the effect of new technologies on the media industry at Harvard Business School. She graduated from Williams College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and received her J.D. from Yale Law School. Most recently, Hood served as a law clerk to the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Nathan Newman
Nathan Newman is Microsoft Research Fellow of the Information Law Institute at New York University. He has been writing about public policy and the Internet for over fifteen years. From 1997-1999, Newman was Program Director at NetAction, where he was an early advocate for anti-trust scrutiny of Microsoft. Most recently, as Policy Director and then Executive Director of Progressive States Network from 2005-2010, he oversaw a state policy program to promote broadband. In the last year, he has worked with community groups in writing reports on the danger of state telecom deregulation. His current research at the Information Law Institute focuses on antitrust, Google and the ways behavioral profiling online can reinforces monopoly and expand general economic inequality in the economy. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC-Berkeley and a J.D. from Yale Law School. His Ph.D. on Internet public policy and local economic development was turned into a book, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits and the Costs to Community (2020).
Heather Patterson
Heather Patterson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Information Law Institute at New York University. Patterson researches changing social norms regarding personal information sharing and expectations of privacy, with an eye toward developing policy solutions that facilitate context-appropriate information flow. She received a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 2012 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 2006. At Berkeley Law, Patterson worked within the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic to develop a framework for evaluating the privacy implications of biometric technologies such as face recognition, iris scanning, and gait recognition, and to develop privacy standards for emerging Smart Grid technologies before the California Public Utilities Commission. Prior to law school, Patterson used behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to assess the cognitive and neural basis of language perception, face recognition, and biological motion detection. She also holds an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.S. in neurobiology and physiology from Purdue University.
Sasha Romanosky
Sasha Romanosky is a Microsoft Research Fellow in the Information Law Institute at New York University. He researches legal and economic issues regarding data security and consumer privacy. Specifically, he examines the impact of data breaches on firm and consumer behaviors, and the extent to which alternative policy interventions (ex ante regulation, information disclosure, and ex post liability) can play in reducing the externalities from data breaches. Sasha earned a PhD from the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Calgary. He was a security professional for over 10 years, predominantly within the financial and e-commerce industries at companies such as Morgan Stanley and eBay. Sasha holds a CISSP certification and is the co-author of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), an open framework for scoring computer vulnerabilities. He is a member of CyLab and the Usable Security and Privacy laboratory (CUPS) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Malte Ziewitz
Malte Ziewitz is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Information Law Institute at New York University. He researches the politics and practicalities of governance in, of and through digitally networked environments. Broadly based in Science and Technology Studies (STS), ethnography and public policy, he is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford, a praxiography of reviewing, rating and ranking in healthcare and search engine optimization (SEO). As Principal Investigator, he headed the ESRC-funded “How’s My Feedback?" project, a collaborative design experiment to rethink and evaluate online review and rating websites. Previously, he was a McCloy Fellow at Harvard University, a Non-resident Fellow at the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen, and a Junior Researcher at the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research. Ziewitz holds a M.P.A. from Harvard University and a First State Exam in Law from the University of Hamburg.
Student Fellows
Solon Barocas is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He was previously a Program Associate at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he helped administer major research initiatives on intercultural contact, social inequality, and the social and political consequences of the war on terror. Earlier, he served as Deputy Editor of Millennium - Journal of International Studies, housed at the London School of Economics, where he also obtained his MSc in International Relations. His master's thesis, De/re/coding Security in 'Societies of Control:' Data-mining as Political Practice, was recently published in a special issue of the St Antony's International Review on "The Internet: Power and Governance in a Digitised World," which he also presented at a related conference co-hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute. Barocas graduated from Brown University with a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations. At the University's Watson Institute for International Studies, he worked for over two years on the Information, Technology, War, and Peace Project.
Luke Stark
Luke Stark is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A native of Toronto, Canada, Luke holds an Honours BA in History and English and an MA in History, both from the University of Toronto; he has been generously funded by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Government of Ontario. Luke's research focuses on the history and philosophy of digital media technology and its role in regulating the everyday affective and emotional lives of individual users and broader publics; he is concurrently working on projects related to the changing dynamics of privacy and security in digital network environments, and is a member of the ILI's Privacy Research Group and a Principal with PRGLabs. Luke is also a Research Assistant for the National Science Foundation's Values in Design in the Future Internet Architecture project, headed by Helen Nissenbaum. Luke's academic pursuits have been complimented by work in Issues Management and Strategic Communications Planning for the Ontario Ministries of Health and Long-Term Care and Natural Resources; other highlights from an eclectic resume include forest ranger, sleep-away camp counsellor, and ranch hand.
Privacy Research Group Affiliates
Catherine Dwyer
Cathy Dwyer is Associate Professor of Information Technology at Pace University. Her research interests include online advertising, online privacy management, and social media. You can find out more about her here.
Travis Hall
Travis Hall is a Ph.D. candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His research interests include biometrics, critical theory, bureaucracy, moral norms and the media, Science and Technology Studies, truth production, and bodies.
Jeramie D. Scott
Jeramie Scott is a third-year law student at NYU.
Past Fellows and Affiliates
Gaia Bernstein: 2002-2003
Finn Brunton: 2010-2011
Amanda Conley: 2009-2010
Niva Elkin-Koren: 2004-2005
Roger Ford: 2011-2012
Joseph Lorenzo Hall: 2011-2012
Jaime Madell: 2010-2011
Alice E. Marwick: 2009-2010
Laura Moy: 2010-2011
Gregory Pomerantz: 2001-2002
Andrew Selbst: 2011-2012
Elizabeth Stark: 2008-2009
Alan Toner: 2001-2002
Philip Weiser: Fall 2008
Dr. Tal Zarsky: 2010-2011
Michael Zimmer: 2004-2007
Jonathan Zittrain: Spring 2008
Administrator
Nicole Arzt
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Room 336
New York, NY 10012-1066
Phone: 212-998-6013
Fax: 212-995-4760
Email: nicole.arzt@nyu.edu